Hackers aren't the real concern for e-voting. Partisan election officials and machine manufacturers are.
That sounds good, but I don't think it's really true.
It's a security axiom that anything can be hacked. It's usually stated inversely as "the only secure machine is off the network in a locked room, powered down". This may also be seen as a result of "Every nontrivial program has at least one bug."
Election officials have no more ability to affect an electronic election than they do with paper ballots. They're still people, still in charge of the details, and we still have no alternative but to trust the process (or become an election official, thus begging the question).
What if it came to light, as it almost certainly would, that a voting machine manufacturer's products were rigged? You just can't keep a secret like that. The consequences of the fraud would be devastating to the manufacturer and to the party it favored.
Lastly, you'r right that comedy is a fine way to put a check on otherwise commonly accepted ideas. "Everybody knows" something until someone pokes fun at it.
But it's a mistake to take your information from only one viewpoint, even if it's from multiple sources. Don't just listen to "The Daily Show", or to Slashdot.org, or "Saturday Night Live". Listen to Rush Limbaugh, Fox, CNN, PBS, and read eff.org. Get a variety, as best you can, so that your mind is kept open.
Paypal sees that porn, gambling, and viagra sales generate a lot of customer complaints. People tend to claim they didn't want the item, it wasn't them, somebody stole their identity, etc. Like any business, they're trying to limit their losses.
Those transactions are all very spammy. Add hot stock tips and Nigerian crown princes and you've pretty summarized my 'caughtspam' folder.
Paypal doesn't want to be in the liability loop for kiddie porn, illegal gambling, and illegal drug sales.
Paypal wants to keep a clean image, and genuinely don't want those transactions. I kind of doubt this was a factor, but there's always hope.
The Fine Article makes an assumption that may not be accurate. It assumes that the current minority party is unable to gain power because of political chicanery on the part of the majority party.
Ten years ago the current minority party held the Presidency, House and Senate. They had held the House and Senate for decades. It was just as hard to defeat an incumbent back then as it is now.
The danger to the USA is not a NeoConservative monoparty. That sounds like FUD to me. The danger to the USA is that we have learned to vote ourselves funds from the public checkbook.
In particular, note the carefully crafted parallelism of "We saw...[injustice, atrocity, etc.]", repeated not as quotations from a group with whom Kerry had met, but as things he himself had seen with his own eyes.
But don't just take my word for it. Read for yourself.
Here's a link.
John Kerry first came to national prominence by testifying under oath before the U.S. Senate that he witnessed events to which he was not a witness. He's proud of that testimony, and still claims it was true.
George Bush did what he could to avoid personally going to war. He doesn't campaign on it.
The answer to spam is to find a way to detect its origin and then to respond to it ruthlessly.
The current SenderID/SPF and other DNSy proposals are a start, but they don't really do the right job. The trouble is they are trying to win too much of the war with one battle. If we fix SMTP such that a recipient knows, with certainty, that the address of the immediate sender is actually correct, then most of the spam problem can be dealt with more effectively by other methods.
We shouldn't then worry about whether a machine is spamming because Grandma has a virus or because it's owned by a spammer. Just DOS the thing, or the network it's on. Spam should be self-defeating: you send it, and you (and your ISP, if necessary) get warned, then blacklisted, then isolated, then deluged, then DOS'd.
The time is past for coddling ourselves. Let's deal with the problem and defeat it.
Shakespeare used the phrase "the enginer hoist by his own petar", meaning a (military) engineer blown up by his own bomb.
The Bard was a master of puns, and knew that his audience would also snicker at the thought of a soldier riding the mushroom cloud of a giant explosion situated between his legs.
Struggling artists
on
TMBG on DRM
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
My sister and her husband are aspiring Country&Western artists/songwriters. Yeah, I know, but that's their dream.
They're having trouble getting people to buy their music. Yeah, I was shocked, too. I suggested that they give it away. They didn't like that idea -- no money in it.
"Why not?", I asked, "No one wants to pay for it. Why not generate some demand?"
I think they're afraid the first song they give away might be the one that would have made them filthy rich if they'd just held on to it.
Suspension of disbelief considered harmful
on
Comic Book Physics
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I grew up on comics - I still have over 1000 of them from the '70s and '80s, stuck back in a closet, wrapped in plastic.
What the good Professor says is not that all comic book situations are based in physical reality -- that's absurd. You don't get to teach at a Big Ten university by being a knucklehead.
He's saying that there are instructive cases, and furthermore that those cases are often the essential ones needed to understand the underlying physics. He's saying that look, this situation that seems like over-the-top unreality is in fact pretty close to the way the universe actually works.
I give him credit for having the guts to teach that way.
The SCO Group seems to have promised, but never delivered, UNIX code that was "copied verbatim" into Linux . None of the millions of lines, 65 files, or some new type of undefined intellectual property have yet materialized.
Hey, maybe this isn't as much a troll as I thought. Oh well, the mod points are yours.
------
UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the U.S. and other countries
Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.
A quake of at least 6.5R will hit Southern California before September 3, 2004.
Arnold Swarzenegger will call out the National Guard and save the day, leading to a Constitutional Amendment declaring him "High Overlord of Der Stat en Kalifehrnzie".
The Colorado river will widen by 11 inches, which will result in parts of it becoming wet.
Tonight, at some point, it will be dark. (my apologies to George Carlin)
I'll be more impressed if they can predict a quake on the less-active, but violent, New Madrid fault.
Using "quote unquote" as a prefix to the purported quote is doubly irritating.
Don't forget the usual dain-bramaged hand choreography.
The world would be measurably better if people would say "so called" instead of "quote unquote". Even, "And then he used the quote facilities unquote to puke out his drunken little guts."
Some of my personal peeves:
"Tough road to hoe" (row to hoe)
"I just assume do [something]" (I'd just as soon...).
"I wasn't doing anying imparticular" (in particular)
"And then she was like, "No way!", and then I was like, "Yep, really!" (substitute a transitive verb for the abused intransitive like)
Ain't is a fine contraction for "am not" or "have not". The trouble with "ain't" is using it in a double negative, or using it in place of "isn't". "I ain't gonna do that, I quit!" is ok. "I ain't no English teacher" is not. But check with the publisher of the journal before using "ain't" in your next paper. (gay smiley withheld by request)
The "Nature" article he refers to can be found here however im not sure I believe he is who he says he is because this article has no mention of Poincare space. Not to mention the history of this poster as a troll.
Here we present a simple geometrical model of a finite, positively curved space
- the Poincare dodecahedral space - which accounts for WMAP's observations
with no fine-tuning required. Circle searching (Cornish, Spergel and Starkman,
1998) may confirm the model's topological predictions, while upcoming Planck
Surveyor data may confirm its predicted density of
0 1.013 > 1. If confirmed,
the model will answer the ancient question of whether space is finite or infinite,
while retaining the standard Friedmann-Lematre foundation for local physics.
Uh, are you sure it's not relevant? Seems fairly on target to me. But then, I'm not a Real Mathematician.
Always be prepared to learn from any source, from the silliest, drunken troll to the most sober robed judge.
The analogy is with a Commercial Driver's License (CDL) versus standard license. Truckers have to have a CDL, and they can lose it pretty quickly by bad driving.
... syndrome. Lawmakers always want something that sounds good, looks good, and will make them appear to be addressing the problem.
The conceptual framework they're working under is wrong. They assume that a single person is the author of a program. Maybe some programs have just one author, but most have several. The main, lead programmer, who is typcially the copyright holder, may not even look at every line of code in a program.
The bit about a culture shift is valuable. Projects should be built with security in mind, using basic principles (least privelege, minimize scope, check your loop bounds, etc.) that are, coincidentally, good programming practice.
But the culture shift that's needed is away from blame-based analysis of security failures and toward cooperative assistance. That shift is assisted by opening source code. Licensing programmers will tend to accentuate the blame attacks when bugs are found, and will provide incentive to hide them.
No program is bug-free. No committee of Licensed Gurus can eyeball scan a progran and find all its bugs. It takes running the program in real-world situations to find some (most) bugs. Licensing the programmer will not decrease the number of bugs in a given program.
Lawmakers would do better to simply stay out of the matter entirely than to introduce bureaucracy for the sake of appearance.
Scripts are intrinsically open source, even if copyrighted and under a closed license. The techniques are visible, and thus instructive.
Ok, slowly: notice the use of lower case in "open source". Notice the next sentence, which talks about techniques being instructive. Copyright does not disallow copying verbatim into your head. Once in your head, you can examine it any way you wish. You can even write it down. You just can't let someone else have a copy.
But the point about techniques being instructive is that ideas and techniques are not copyrightable. Facts such as mathematical formulas are not copyrightable. The code is what is copyrightable, as an expression of an idea.
If ideas were copyrightable, there would be only about six country and western songs.
I make my living as a Unix sysadmin, to support my hobby as a Real Programmer:-p.
Without shell scripts, I'd be lost.
Shell scripts provide the ability to leverage the work of every well-behaved perl (etc.) script, binary in/bin, and other shell script ever written. While the same can be said for perl scripts (which I happily use or write when needed), with shell scripting this is the intended paradigm.
Scripts are intrinsically open source, even if copyrighted and under a closed license. The techniques are visible, and thus instructive.
Given Unix's design attribute of easy process creation, shell scripting is often the best way for me to handle a task.
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds good, but I don't think it's really true.
It's a security axiom that anything can be hacked. It's usually stated inversely as "the only secure machine is off the network in a locked room, powered down". This may also be seen as a result of "Every nontrivial program has at least one bug."
Election officials have no more ability to affect an electronic election than they do with paper ballots. They're still people, still in charge of the details, and we still have no alternative but to trust the process (or become an election official, thus begging the question).
What if it came to light, as it almost certainly would, that a voting machine manufacturer's products were rigged? You just can't keep a secret like that. The consequences of the fraud would be devastating to the manufacturer and to the party it favored.
Lastly, you'r right that comedy is a fine way to put a check on otherwise commonly accepted ideas. "Everybody knows" something until someone pokes fun at it.
But it's a mistake to take your information from only one viewpoint, even if it's from multiple sources. Don't just listen to "The Daily Show", or to Slashdot.org, or "Saturday Night Live". Listen to Rush Limbaugh, Fox, CNN, PBS, and read eff.org. Get a variety, as best you can, so that your mind is kept open.
Paypal sees that porn, gambling, and viagra sales generate a lot of customer complaints. People tend to claim they didn't want the item, it wasn't them, somebody stole their identity, etc. Like any business, they're trying to limit their losses.
Those transactions are all very spammy. Add hot stock tips and Nigerian crown princes and you've pretty summarized my 'caughtspam' folder.
Paypal doesn't want to be in the liability loop for kiddie porn, illegal gambling, and illegal drug sales.
Paypal wants to keep a clean image, and genuinely don't want those transactions. I kind of doubt this was a factor, but there's always hope.
Ok, I did.
I'd like to see George W. Bush reelected.
(Shields up!)
The Fine Article makes an assumption that may not be accurate. It assumes that the current minority party is unable to gain power because of political chicanery on the part of the majority party.
Ten years ago the current minority party held the Presidency, House and Senate. They had held the House and Senate for decades. It was just as hard to defeat an incumbent back then as it is now.
The danger to the USA is not a NeoConservative monoparty. That sounds like FUD to me. The danger to the USA is that we have learned to vote ourselves funds from the public checkbook.
In particular, note the carefully crafted parallelism of "We saw...[injustice, atrocity, etc.]", repeated not as quotations from a group with whom Kerry had met, but as things he himself had seen with his own eyes.
But don't just take my word for it. Read for yourself. Here's a link.John Kerry first came to national prominence by testifying under oath before the U.S. Senate that he witnessed events to which he was not a witness. He's proud of that testimony, and still claims it was true.
George Bush did what he could to avoid personally going to war. He doesn't campaign on it.
John Kerry is still the same guy.
George Bush is not the same guy.
Relevant? Yep.
The answer to spam is to find a way to detect its origin and then to respond to it ruthlessly.
The current SenderID/SPF and other DNSy proposals are a start, but they don't really do the right job. The trouble is they are trying to win too much of the war with one battle. If we fix SMTP such that a recipient knows, with certainty, that the address of the immediate sender is actually correct, then most of the spam problem can be dealt with more effectively by other methods.
We shouldn't then worry about whether a machine is spamming because Grandma has a virus or because it's owned by a spammer. Just DOS the thing, or the network it's on. Spam should be self-defeating: you send it, and you (and your ISP, if necessary) get warned, then blacklisted, then isolated, then deluged, then DOS'd.
The time is past for coddling ourselves. Let's deal with the problem and defeat it.
It was bound to happen sooner or later.
Oh well, youth is fleeting.
I just hope this doesn't signal a general change in direction for Slashdot, but simply a recognition that politics really is for nerds.
You are correct! $grandparent_post =~ s/faster/as fast/;
In your example, that's where the deception is:
"100% faster" means 2 times faster.
Shakespeare used the phrase "the enginer hoist by his own petar", meaning a (military) engineer blown up by his own bomb.
The Bard was a master of puns, and knew that his audience would also snicker at the thought of a soldier riding the mushroom cloud of a giant explosion situated between his legs.
My sister and her husband are aspiring Country&Western artists/songwriters. Yeah, I know, but that's their dream.
They're having trouble getting people to buy their music. Yeah, I was shocked, too. I suggested that they give it away. They didn't like that idea -- no money in it.
"Why not?", I asked, "No one wants to pay for it. Why not generate some demand?"
I think they're afraid the first song they give away might be the one that would have made them filthy rich if they'd just held on to it.
I grew up on comics - I still have over 1000 of them from the '70s and '80s, stuck back in a closet, wrapped in plastic.
What the good Professor says is not that all comic book situations are based in physical reality -- that's absurd. You don't get to teach at a Big Ten university by being a knucklehead.
He's saying that there are instructive cases, and furthermore that those cases are often the essential ones needed to understand the underlying physics. He's saying that look, this situation that seems like over-the-top unreality is in fact pretty close to the way the universe actually works.
I give him credit for having the guts to teach that way.
The SCO Group seems to have promised, but never delivered, UNIX code that was "copied verbatim" into Linux . None of the millions of lines, 65 files, or some new type of undefined intellectual property have yet materialized.
Hey, maybe this isn't as much a troll as I thought. Oh well, the mod points are yours.
------UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the U.S. and other countries
Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.
Yes. They found that Linux is 100% plagiarized from material found at www.kernel.org.
I predict that:
I'll be more impressed if they can predict a quake on the less-active, but violent, New Madrid fault.
I bet the entire profits for SCOG in the year 2006 that the shareholders will never sue the officers. I am confident in my wager because:
SCOX is mostly held by insiders. And they're selling.
two independent clauses
Err, you're right, I did, that's a horrible thing to do, I'll never do it again!
Don't forget the usual dain-bramaged hand choreography.
The world would be measurably better if people would say "so called" instead of "quote unquote". Even, "And then he used the quote facilities unquote to puke out his drunken little guts."
Some of my personal peeves:
Uh, are you sure it's not relevant? Seems fairly on target to me. But then, I'm not a Real Mathematician.
Always be prepared to learn from any source, from the silliest, drunken troll to the most sober robed judge.
Mod parent up.
The analogy is with a Commercial Driver's License (CDL) versus standard license. Truckers have to have a CDL, and they can lose it pretty quickly by bad driving.
... syndrome. Lawmakers always want something that sounds good, looks good, and will make them appear to be addressing the problem.
The conceptual framework they're working under is wrong. They assume that a single person is the author of a program. Maybe some programs have just one author, but most have several. The main, lead programmer, who is typcially the copyright holder, may not even look at every line of code in a program.
The bit about a culture shift is valuable. Projects should be built with security in mind, using basic principles (least privelege, minimize scope, check your loop bounds, etc.) that are, coincidentally, good programming practice.
But the culture shift that's needed is away from blame-based analysis of security failures and toward cooperative assistance. That shift is assisted by opening source code. Licensing programmers will tend to accentuate the blame attacks when bugs are found, and will provide incentive to hide them.
No program is bug-free. No committee of Licensed Gurus can eyeball scan a progran and find all its bugs. It takes running the program in real-world situations to find some (most) bugs. Licensing the programmer will not decrease the number of bugs in a given program.
Lawmakers would do better to simply stay out of the matter entirely than to introduce bureaucracy for the sake of appearance.
Ok, slowly: notice the use of lower case in "open source". Notice the next sentence, which talks about techniques being instructive. Copyright does not disallow copying verbatim into your head. Once in your head, you can examine it any way you wish. You can even write it down. You just can't let someone else have a copy.
But the point about techniques being instructive is that ideas and techniques are not copyrightable. Facts such as mathematical formulas are not copyrightable. The code is what is copyrightable, as an expression of an idea.
If ideas were copyrightable, there would be only about six country and western songs.
I make my living as a Unix sysadmin, to support my hobby as a Real Programmer :-p.
Without shell scripts, I'd be lost.
Shell scripts provide the ability to leverage the work of every well-behaved perl (etc.) script, binary in /bin, and other shell script ever written. While the same can be said for perl scripts (which I happily use or write when needed), with shell scripting this is the intended paradigm.
Scripts are intrinsically open source, even if copyrighted and under a closed license. The techniques are visible, and thus instructive.
Given Unix's design attribute of easy process creation, shell scripting is often the best way for me to handle a task.
See some examples here.